Sarah Wrote That

Amelia Atlas reviews three newish Berlin novels:

It is easy, in Berlin, to find oneself in the grip of an uncommon inertia. The city’s topography, at once absorbing and alienating, makes for a distracting plaything. It’s hard to capture the physical strangeness of Berlin, but I’m confident that it’s the only cosmopolitan European capital where you can get lost in a sandpit for several blocks in the middle of the city on the way to a party. This bizarre openness—the feeling of expansive space in an urban environment—has the additional effect of distending time. There is none of the compressed bustle that keeps a city like New York moving forward.

Read the first chapter of Chloe Aridjis’s Book Of Clouds.

"Now Turkish screenwriters have learned to adapt these shows to local themes with Muslim storylines, Turkish production values have improved, and Asians and Eastern Europeans are buying Turkish series, not American or Brazilian or Mexican ones. They get the same cheating and the children out of wedlock and the incestuous affairs but with a Turkish sauce on top." →

"It is bad enough that we as a nation have been so long subjected to this earth-mother balderdash. It is far worse that, apparently, someone out there is not only believing it but also ascribing this orchidish little packet of anti-intellectual cliché to anything in a skirt."

- Annie Dillard

An upside to Facebook: apparently you don’t need to “like” The Massachusetts Review (though why wouldn’t you?) to view Annie Dillard’s 1980 letter to the editor.

The End of Eternity →

In the summer Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser reviews a reissue of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity:

For Asimov, super-civilization and technological achievement always go hand-in-hand with a general softening or attenuation of the human spirit, and it is only by getting back to basics (or intuition, or felt sensation) that people can continue to move ahead.

The summer I was fourteen, we stayed in the house of a co-worker of my father’s while the co-worker’s family was in southern France.  Someone in the family was a huge Asimov fan, and on particularly cold days when my dad was working, I would sit in a little white sitting room with a wall of windows out onto a windy garden and read Asimov.  I still find The End of Eternity’s set-up pleasing to puzzle over.  It’s like math as a story, the idea of a time-line with centuries like subway stops at different dates.  Except for 

the “hidden” centuries between the 70,000th and the 150,000th. [W]hen they [the Eternals] enter the system after that, all they find is a dead, uninhabited, featureless world.

Why are the centuries hidden?  Don’t you just have to find out?

"The driver of the island’s only taxi was a tall, thin man, with almost invisible eyes and a sparse, brown, asymmetrical mustache. He drove his rickety old car in a kind of drunken weave, from one side to the other of the road. Shrill, improbable cries of “Taxi! Taxi! Taxi!” rang out from behind the rocks and hills, and from the sea. It turned out that the man was a ventriloquist. This cry of “Taxi” was his talent, and his only joke. He required, every few seconds, to be praised for it. “Taxi!” he would scream from a passing motorbike or donkey cart. “Taxi!” from behind a cow."

Renata Adler, Speedboat

I am moving this week, and I successfully made it through packing my books with only two stops to read: one for a Poets & Writer’s article about online literary magazines, the other for the copy of Speedboat I picked up in The Strand last summer.  I love the confidence in Adler’s sentence structure, the assurance with which she leads us away from assurance.  My sense is that the novel’s strangeness is of a very different sort than today’s experimental aesthetic would necessarily endorse.  It is very upfront about its cosmopolitanism; it tells rather than shows and it has a lot of opinions.  A divergent branch of fiction evolution.

Mark Athitakis comments in more detail.

Neda Agha-Soltan, the deceased protester, left; Neda Soltani, the political refugee, right

seaofgreen:

Neda Soltani is the ordinary Iranian woman whose image spread last summer in an instant around the world. She’s a symbol of the brutality of the Iranian regime and the resilience of Iran’s movement for democracy. She’s also still alive.

This is the incredible story of what happened when the age of social media collided with political upheaval in a land behind a curtain — and how it even forced a 32-year-old graduate student into political exile.

As Foreign Policy notes, “a disheartening education in applied media ethics.”